iKnowCentral.com and Consultants Advantage

I’ve recently become an Advisor to the Board of NVIEM, the leader in neural-visual enterprise management with applications for digital curation of tribal knowledge, and the corralling of loose information.

Consider how useful it would be to visually navigate through the tribal knowledge that has built up inside a consulting firm:

Which consultants had which particular skills applied to what projects and clients?

Which projects and clients proved – or disproved – a particular expertise that the firm claims to have?

Where are the best presentations, demonstrations, white papers, and other ‘assets’ stored within the various document repositories of the firm?

In a particular project, or software implementation, all key decisions are usually documented, through project or meeting notes, as to the outcome and the decision to proceed forward. But where is the documentation about how or why those decisions were made? That information is very useful later on when updates happen, when circumstances change and the previous course doesn’t seem right anymore, when staff and consultants change and new people – without tribal knowledge – come on board. All of that loose information, that tribal knowledge, would benefit greatly from being “digitally curated.”

A curation is like a museum – where are the paintings? The classical paintings? The classical paintings of a given period? or of a given artist? or of a theme? Or like being in a library – Where are the books of fiction? The mystery novels? The historical mystery novels? The historical, romantic, mystery novels?

You can apply this idea of digital curation to communities, or ‘birds of a feather’ as well. Consider a community of firms that all partner with the same computer software developer, perhaps Oracle’s JD Edwards partner community in which I have been involved for many years. Each partner has their own web site. Oracle has a “Partner Network” website. Yet it is extremely hard, if not impossible, for a JD Edwards customer to identify which partner might have experience with pharmaceutical manufacturing cost accounting.

Consider solving that problem. A partner website might note experience with the life science industry; another place on the website might note experience with manufacturing, or accounting problems. But if this is a driving factor in attracting new business to the partner, it is still not easy to identify the intersection of these capabilities and experiences. And, you would not turn first to your web site and add layers and layers of such detail, first of all because it would be exposed to your competitors as well as potential customers.

But with iKnowCentral, this JD Edwards partner could own a top level node within the overall JD Edwards community of iKnowCentral.com. And the partner’s primary child nodes could mimic their own website, building another digital channel – at very low cost – to drive traffic to their website. But beyond that, within “iKC”, the partner could freely and easily add additional child nodes that wave a digital flag saying “Hey! I have pharmaceutical manufacturing cost accounting experience, as well as any other ‘rifle shot’ experiences they’d like to promote. Landing on that node, the prospective visitor could be presented with some information (“digital assets”) that are suitable for public consumption, and then would be asked to ‘register’ and become ‘known’ to the partner firm, before being invited into more secure nodes with deeper information about this cost accounting expertise. Even deeper, more secure nodes could be available to the partner’s own employees – project managers, solution architects, client executives – to reveal more intimate details about those pharmaceutical manufacturing cost accounting experiences, client names, real life details – in short, tribal knowledge, complete with links to private presentations, stored documents, and the like.

The best part, is that along the way, each node can contain digital advertising that earns the partner money from their visitors, thus paying for the entire experience.

More later, in future posts, about how this same iKnowCentral could transform the gathering of loose information and the sharing of tribal knowledge for a non-profit, especially one with a central or head office, many regional or state councils, and hundreds or thousands of local affiliates or chapters. And, how iKnowCentral could help government/municipal/regional agencies or services to group their digital assets and make them more friendly and accessible to end users trying to find information about available services.

And in one more post to come very soon, a discussion of how the neural-visual engine behind iKnowCentral can be pointed at a particular company’s own projects and implementations to document “why” decisions were made, using the very documentation that likely already exists. We call this “Consultants Advantage.”